Goodbye GeoCities, Thanks for the memories :)

Before the rise of dynamic content management systems and inexpensive hosting services, the first age of self-publishing was spearheaded by hand-cobbled HTML pages on clunky hosted platforms. The greatest relic of that age disappears yesterday.

As Yahoo announced earlier this year, GeoCities (Geocities.com) closes down October 26. Sadly, this isn’t a decommissioning — this is a deletion. All those goofy homepages and their blinky GIFs will be permanently lost to history. If you’re one of the pioneers whose first efforts at online self-expression involved ridiculously cryptic subfolder hierarchies that mimicked the geographic limitations of the offline world, i hope you saved your files.

GeoCities by a small company out of Beverly Hills, it became a very popular free service. Yahoo saw the opportunity and in 1999, they snagged this internet portal up for 4.7 billion.

GeoCities has gone downhill. Part of it was not Yahoo’s fault – GeoCities still required you to know a little HTML. The page builder got better with time, but ultimately sites like MySpace and Facebook showed people you didn’t need to know that icky html code to make a web page.